Category: video games

I always have this sensation, descending the steps at Edinburgh’s Waverley Station, of narratives colliding. It’s a kind of acute deja vu, where several selves are pelting it down for the last train, or gliding idly at the end point of an evening, not quite ready for the journey home. The version that is me glows inwardly translucent, lets in the early morning light, as though she might photosynthesise. I remember this Roddy Woomble song, from his first album, the one that was sorrow, and was Scotland, through and through as a bowl of salted porridge, of sickly sugared Irn Bru. ‘Waverley Steps’, with its opening line, ‘If there’s no geography / in the things that we say’. Every word, I realise, is a situation. Alighting, departing; deferring or arriving. It’s 08:28 and I’m sitting at Waverley Station, having made my way down its steps, hugging my bag while a stranger beside me eats slices of apple from a plastic packet. I’ve just read Derek Jarman’s journal, the bit about regretting how easily we can now get any fruit we want at any time of year. He laments that soon enough we’ll be able to pick up bundles of daffodils in time for Christmas. The apples this girl eats smell of plastic, of fake perfume, not fruit. I’m about to board a train that will take me, eventually, to Thurso and then on via ferry to Orkney. I wonder if they will have apples on Orkney; it’s rumoured that they don’t have trees. Can we eat without regard to the seasons on islands also?

I needn’t have worried. Kirkwall has massive supermarkets. I check my own assumptions upon arrival, expecting inflated prices and corner shops. I anticipated the sort of wind that would buffet me sideways, but the air is fairly calm. I swill a half pint of Tennents on the ferry, watching the sun go down, golden-orange, the Old Man of Hoy looming close enough to get the fear from. Something about ancient structures of stone always gives me vertigo. Trying to reconcile all those temporal scales at once, finding yourself plunged. A panpsychic sense that the spirit of the past ekes itself eerily from pores of rock. Can be read in a primitive braille of marks and striations. We pick our way through Kirkwall to the SYHA hostel, along winding residential streets. I comment on how quiet it is, how deliciously dark. We don’t see stars but the dark is real, lovely and thick. Black treacle skies keep silent the island. I am so intent in the night I feel dragged from reality.

Waking on my first day, I write in my notebook: ‘the sky is a greyish egg-white background gleaming remnant dawn’. In the lounge of the hostel, someone has the telly on—news from Westminster. Later, I’m in a bookshop in Stromness, browsing books about the island while the Radio 2 Drivetime traffic reports of holdups on motorways circling London. Standing there, clasping Ebban an Flowan, I feel between two times. A slim poetry volume by Alec Finlay and Laura Watt, with photographs by Alastair Peebles, Ebban an Flowan is Orkney’s present and future: a primer on marine renewable energy. Poetry as cultural sculpting, as speculation and continuity: ‘there’s no need to worry / that any wave is wasted / when there’s all this motion’. New ideas of sustainability and energy churn on the page before me, while thousands down south are burning up oil on the London orbital.

When we take a bus tour of Mainland Orkney’s energy sources, we play a game of spotting every electric car we see. Someone on the bus, an academic who lives here, knows exactly how many electric cars there are on the island. There’s a solidarity in that, a pride in folk knowledge, the act of knowing. On the train up to Thurso, I started a game of infrastructure bingo, murmuring the word whenever I spotted a pylon, a station or a turbine. Say it, just say it: infrastructure. Something satisfying in its soft susurration, infra as potential to be both within and between, a shifting. Osmosis, almost. The kinesis of moving your lips for fra, feeling a brief schism between skin and teeth. A generative word. Say it enough times and you will summon something: an ambient awareness of those gatherings around you, sources of fuel, object, energy.

The supermarkets in Kirkwall seem like misplaced temples. This was me idealising the remoteness of islands, wanting to live by an insular, scarcer logic. The more we go north, the more scarcity we crave—a sort of existential whittling. Before visiting, I envisioned the temperature dropping by halves. On the first night, warm in my bed, I write: ‘To feel on the brink of something, then ever equi-distant’. The WiFi picks up messages from home. Scrolling the algorithmic rolls of Instagram, I feel extra-simultaneous with these random images, snapshots of happenings around the world. Being on an island intensifies my present. In Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun (2016), a memoir of recovery and return on Orkney, Liptrot writes of ‘waiting for the next gale to receive my text messages’. On the whims of billowing signal, we wait for news of the south to arrive. Maybe I was an island and I wanted my life elsewhere to vanish, disappear in a wall of wind; I wanted to exist just here, in a hullabaloo of nowness.

I say an island, but of course Orkney is more an archipelago. And I’m on the Mainland, home to the burghs of Stromness and Kirkwall. Here for the ASLE-UKI conference, there wasn’t time to visit the harbour at Scapa, or the neolithic village of Skara Brae or the stone circle Ring of Brodgar. I spend most of my time in the town hall opposite Kirkwall’s impressive, sandstone cathedral, aglow by night with fairy lights strung in surrounding trees. Yes, trees. Orkney has trees. They are often gnarled-looking and strange, stripped by wind or held up inside by steel plinths. Anthropocene arboreal hybrids. But still they are trees. Using my plant identification app, I find hazels and birches. Autumn is traceable in the swirls of thin leaves that skirt the pavement, tousling our sense of a general transition.

At one point in the trip, we visit the Burgar Hill Energy Project in Evie, alighting from the bus to stand underneath several massive turbines. The sound is wonderful, a deep churning whirr that feels like the air pressed charge on repeat. Under the chug chug chug of those great white wings we gathered, listened, moved and dispersed. I watch as our tight knit group begins to fragment; we need time apart to absorb this properly, little cells bouncing off and away from each other, quietly charged, loosening dots of pollen. Some of us finding the outer reach of the hill, looking for a view or panorama, leaning back to snap a photograph. I film the shadows windmilling dark the rough green grass. Capturing the turbines themselves seemed almost obscene. I don’t know why I was making them into idols, afraid to reduce them to pictures. It was easier to glimpse them in pieces, a flash of white, synecdoche. My friend Katy and I agreed the best photos were the ones out of focus, a bird-like blur against the blue.

Places I have been hit by wind:

The cloisters at the University of Glasgow, a wind-tunnel roar to blast out your thoughts post-exam.

The last day of the Wickerman Festival, wrestling with tents that needed drying and folding, the wind blasting against my cliff of a hangover.

On the deck of a ferry, mascara stinging the black black veil of my lashes.

I am an air sign, Gemini, and there is something about losing your breath to elemental forces. I think I once finished a poem with a phrase like, ‘lashing the planetary way of all this’. We used to stand in the playground at school, brandishing our jackets like polyester wings, letting the wind move us forward, staggering in our lightweight bodies, our childish intuition of the way of the world. The pleasure in surrendering. Making of your body a buffeted object. Returning to Glasgow, I soon find myself hit with a cold, preemptive fresher’s flu; a weight on my chest, a diaphragm lag. A sense of my body heaving against itself.

On Orkney, I can smell the salt from the sea. Earlier in the summer, I was struck with wisdom tooth pain, the kind that requires salt-water rinses every half hour, not to mention agonised gargles of whisky. Wasting my precious bottle of Talisker. Amid the haze of those painkiller days, I felt closer to an elemental heat. Metonymically, I was inhaling islands. The taste of self-preservation, of necessary self-sustenance, is never as strong and unwanted as when you want a part of yourself to be wrenched out of you. Pulling teeth is an easy metaphor for lost love, or other forms of psychic distress. Breaking apart, making of the self an archipelago. There’s that song by The National, ‘I Should Live in Salt’, which always sticks in my head in granular form, occasional line. Refrain of refrains, ‘I should live in salt for leaving you behind’. I never knew whether Matt Berninger was singing about preservation or pain, but I saw myself lying down in a kelp bed, child-size, letting the waves lap over my body, salt suffusing the pores of my skin. Begin again, softer.

The rain here is more a tangential shimmer. I wake up to it, dreaming that my window was broken and no-one would bother to fix it. Fear of boundaries loosened, the outside in. The future as a sheet of glass, a shelf you could place your self on and drink. Salt water rinse and heat of whisky. We leave the hostel early and wander beyond the Kirkwall harbour, to the hydrogen plant bordering an industrial estate. Katy and I discussed our fondness for industrial estates as homely reminders. She would go running, and wherever she ran the industrial zones were inevitable. As if in any city you would reach that realm, it called you in with its corrugated fronts and abrasive loneliness. My love for the canal, biking up through Maryhill where the warehouses watch serenely over you, loom behind trees, barely a machinic rumble disturbing the birds. We traced the edge of a man-made waterfront, a crescent curving lip of land. The way it curled was elliptical, it didn’t finish its inward whorls of land upon water, but still I thought of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, or the cinnamon buns I bought from the Kirkwall Tesco. Finding a bench, we ate bananas for breakfast, looking out at the grey-blue sea, our fingers purpling with the cold. I like to think of the banana, Katy said, as a solid unit of energy. Here we were, already recalibrating reality by the logic of pulse and burn and calories. Feeling infra.

I love the words ‘gigawatt’, ‘kilocal’, ‘megabyte’. I like the easeful parcelling up of numbers and storage and energy. I am unable to grasp these scales and sizes visually or temporally, but it helps to find them in words.

We learn about differences between national and local grids, how wind is surveyed, how wave power gets extracted from the littoral zone. My mind oscillates between a sonar attentiveness and deep exhaustion, the restfulness gleaned from island air and waking with sunrise. I slip in and out of sleep on the bus as it swerves round corners. I am pleasantly jostled with knowledge and time, the precious duration of being here. Here. Here, exactly. This intuition vanishes when I try to write it. A note: ‘I know what the gaps between trees must feel like’. Listening to experienced academics, scientists and creatives talk about planes, axes, loops and striations, ages of ages, I find myself in the auratic realm of save as…, dwelling in the constant recording of motion, depth and time. Taking pictures, scribbling words, drawing maps and lines and symbols. We talk of Orkney as a model for the world. Everything has its overlay, the way we parse our experience with apps and books and wireless signals. Someone takes a phone call, posts a tweet. I scroll through the conference hashtag with the hostel WiFi, tracing the day through these crumbs of perspective, memories silently losing their fizz in the night.

I grew up by the sea, in Maybole, Ayrshire (with its ‘blue moors’, as W. S. Graham puts it), but a lot of my thalassic time was spent virtually. I loved video games like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, where the narrative happened between islands, where much of the gameplay involved conducting voyages across the sea. The interstitial thrill of a journey. There were whirlpools, tornados, monsters rising from the deep. On Maidens Harbour, I could hardly reach that volcanic plug of sparkling granite, the Ailsa Craig, or swim out to Arran; virtually, however, I could traverse whatever limits the game had designed. The freedom in that, of exploring a world already set and scaled. Movement produced within constraint. In real life, mostly our bodies and minds constrain. What excites me now is what I took for granted then: the salt spray stinging my lips, the wind in my hair, the glint of shells bleached clean by the sea; a beautiful cascade of cliches that make us.

‘To wake up and really see things…passages from a neverland.’ Back in Glasgow, fallen upon familiar nocturnal rhythms, I find myself craving the diurnal synchrony I achieved in Orkney. Sleepy afternoons so rich in milky light. The vibrational warmth of the ferry’s engine, activating that primitive desire for oil, the petrol smell at stations as my mother filled up the car for journeys to England. My life has often been defined by these journeys between north and south, born in Hertfordshire but finding an early home in Ayrshire. Swapping that heart for air, and all porosity of potential identity. Laura Watt talked of her work as an ethnographer, interviewing the people of Orkney to find out more about their experiences of energy, the way infrastructural change impacts their daily lives, their health, their business. Within that collaboration, she tells us, there’s also a sense of responsibility: stories carry a personal heft, something that begs immunity from diffusion. Some stories, she says, you can’t tell again. The ethics of care there. I wonder if this goes the same for stone, the stories impregnated within the neolithic rocks we glimpse on Orkney. Narrative formations lost to history’s indifferent abstraction, badly parsed by present-day humans along striated lines, evidence of fissure and collision. All that plastic the ocean spits back, co-evolutions of geology and humans. Plastiglomerates along the shore. But Orkney feels pure and relatively litter-free, so goes my illusions, my sense of island exceptionalism. I become more aware of the waste elsewhere. The only person I see smoking, in my whole time there, is a man who speeds his car up Kirkwall’s high street. Smoke and oil, the infinite partners; extraction and exhaustion, the smouldering of all our physical addictions. Nicotine gives the body a rhythm, a spike and recede and a need.

We learn of a Microsoft server sunk under the sea, adjacent to Orkney. There’s enough room in those computers, according to a BBC report, to store ‘five million movies’. And so the cloud contains these myriad worlds, whirring warm within the deep. Minerals, wires and plastics crystallise the code of all our text and images. Apparently the cooler environment will reduce corrosion. I remember the shipyard on Cumbrae, another island; its charnel ground of rusted boats and iron shavings. The lurid brilliance of all that orange, temporal evidence of the sea’s harsh moods, the constant prickle of salt in the air. The way it seems like fire against all those cool flakes of cerulean paint. I wrote a blog post about that shipyard once, so eager to mythologise: ‘Billowing storms, sails failing amidst inevitable shipwreck. It’s difficult to imagine such disasters on this pretty island, yet there is an uncanny sense to this space, as if we have entered a secret porthole, discovered what was supposed to be invisible to outsiders…The quietness recalls an abandoned film set’. Does tourism lend an eerie voyeurism to the beauty we see, conscious of these objects, landscapes and events being photographed many times over? Perhaps the mirage of other islands and hills glimpsed over the blue or green is more the aura of our human conceptions, archival obsession—the camera lights left buzzing in the air, traced for eternity.

I come to Orkney during a time of transition, treading water before a great turn in my life. Time at sea as existential suspension. There have been some departures, severings, personal hurts, burgeoning projects and new beginnings. A great tiredness and fog over everything. ‘Cells of fuel are fuelling cells’. At the conference, my brain teems with this rich, mechanical vocabulary: copper wires and plates and words for wattage, transmission, the reveries of innovation. There is a turning over, leaf after leaf; I fill up my book with radials, coal and rain. My mind attains a different altitude. I think mostly about the impressions that are happening around me: the constant flow of conversation, brought in again as we move between halls and rooms, bars and timelines in our little human estuaries. We visit Stromness Academy, to see Luke Jerram’s ‘Museum of the Moon’: a seven-metre rendition of lunar sublimity, something to stand beneath, touch, lie under. I learn the word for the moon’s basaltic seas is ‘Maria’, feel eerily sparked, spread identity into ether. We listen, quietly, in the ambient dark, taking in composer Dan Jones’ textures of sound, the Moonlight Sonata, the cresting noise of radio reports—landings from a future-past, a lost utopia.

On Friday night, Katy and I catch the overnight ferry back to Aberdeen. Sleep on my cinema seat has a special intensity, a falling through dreams so vivid they smudge themselves on every minute caught between reading and waking. Jarman’s gardens enrich my fantasy impressions, and I slip inside the micro print, the inky paragraphs. I dream of oil and violets and sharp desire, a pearlescent ghost ship glimmer on a raging, Romantic sea. Tides unrealised, tides I can’t parse with my eyes alone; felt more as a rhythm within me. Later, on land I will miss that oceanic shudder, the sense of being wavy. I have found myself like this before, chemically enhanced or drunk, starving and stumbling towards bathrooms. We share drinking tales which remind me of drowning, finding in the midst of the city a seaborne viscosity of matter and memory, of being swept elsewhere. Why is it I always reach for marinal metaphor? Flood doors slam hard the worlds behind me. There are points in the night I wake up and check my phone for the time, noticing the lack of GPRS, or otherwise signal. I feel totally unmoored in those moments, deliciously given to the motioning whims of the ferry. Here I am, a passenger without place. We could be anywhere, on anyone’s ocean. I realise my privilege at being able to extract pleasure from this geographic anonymity, with a home to return to, a mainland I know as my own. The ocean is hardly this windswept playground for everyone; many lose their lives to its terminal desert. Sorrow for people lost to water. Denise Riley’s call to ‘look unrelentingly’. I sip from my bottle, water gleaned from a tap in Orkney. I am never sure whether to say on or in. How to differentiate between immersion and inhabitation, what to make of the whirlwinds of temporary dwelling. How to transcend the selfish and surface bonds of a tourist.

The little islands of our minds reach out across waves, draw closer. I dream of messages sent from people I love, borne along subaquatic signals, a Drexciya techno pulsing in my chest, down through my headphones. My CNS becomes a set of currents, blips and tidal replies. A week later, deliriously tired, I nearly faint at a Wooden Shijps gig, watching the psychedelic visuals resolve into luminous, oceanic fractals. It’s like I’m being born again and every sensation hurts, those solos carried off into endless nowhere.

Time passes and signal returns. We wake at six and head out on deck to watch the sunrise, laughing at the circling gulls and the funny way they tuck in their legs when they fly. These seabirds have a sort of grace, unlike the squawking, chip-loving gulls of our hometowns, stalking the streets at takeaway hour. The light is peachy, a frail soft acid, impressionist pools reflecting electric lamps. I think of the last lecture of the conference, Rachel Dowse’s meditations on starlings as trash animals, possessing a biological criticality as creatures in transition. I make of the sky a potential plain of ornithomancy, looking for significant murmurations, evidence of darkness to come. But there is nothing but gulls, a whey-coloured streak of connected cumulus. The wake rolls out behind us, a luxurious carpet of rippling blue. We are going south again. The gulls recede. Aberdeen harbour is a cornucopia of infrastructure, coloured crates against the grey, with gothic architecture looming through morning mist behind.

Later I alight at the Waverley Steps again. Roddy in my ear, ‘Let the light be mined away’. My time on the island has been one of excavation and skimming, doing the work of an academic, a tourist, a maker at once. Dredging up materials of my own unconscious, or dragging them back again, making of them something new. Cold, shiny knowledge. The lay of the heath and bend of bay. I did not get into the sea to swim, I didn’t feel the cold North rattle right through my bones. But my nails turned blue in the freezing wind, my cheeks felt the mist of ocean rain. I looked at maps and counted the boats. I thought about what it must be like to cut out a life for yourself on these islands.

Home now, I find myself watching badly-dubbed documentaries about Orkney on YouTube, less for the picturesque imagery than the sensation of someone saying those names: Papay, Scapa, Eday, Hoy. Strong names cut from rock, so comforting to say. I read over the poems of Scotland’s contemporary island poets, Jen Hadfield for Shetland, Niall Campbell for Uist. Look for the textures of the weather in each one, the way they catch a certain kind of light; I read with a sort of aggression for the code, the manifest ‘truth’ of experience— it’s like cracking open a geode. I don’t normally read like this, leaving my modernist cynicism behind. I long for outposts among rough wind and mind, Campbell’s ‘The House by the Sea, Eriskay’: ‘This is where the drowned climb to land’. I read about J. H. Prynne’s huts, learn the word ‘sheiling’. Remember the bothies we explored on long walks as children. There’s a need for enchantment when city life churns a turbulent drone, so I curl into these poems, looking for clues: ‘In a fairy-tale, / a boy squeezed a pebble / until it ran milk’ (Hadfield, ‘The Porcelain Cliff’). Poetry becomes a way of building a shelter. I’m struck with the sense of these poets making: time and matter are kneaded with weight and precision, handled by pauses, the shape-making slump of syntax. Energy and erosion, elemental communion. Motion and rest. My fragile body becomes a fleshwork of blood and bone and artery, hardly an island, inclined to allergy and outline, a certain porosity; an island only in vain tributary. I write it in stanzas, excoriate my thoughts, reach for someone in the night. I think about how we provide islands for others, ports in a storm. Let others into our lives for temporary warmth, then cast ourselves out to sea, sometimes sinking.

Why live on an island? In Orkney we were asked to think with the sea, not against it. To see it not as a barrier but an agential force, teeming with potential energy. Our worries about lifestyle and problematic infrastructure, transport and connection were playfully derided by a local scholar as ‘tarmac thinking’. Back in a city, I’ve carried this with me. The first time I read The Outrun was in the depths of winter, 2016, hiding in some empty, elevated garrett of the university library. I’d made my own form of remoteness; that winter, more than a stairwell blocked me off from the rest of existence. Now, I read in quick passages, lively bursts; I cycle along the Clyde at night and wonder the ways in which this connects us, its cola-dark waters swirling northwards, dragged by eventual tides. I circle back to a concept introduced by anthropologists at Rice University, Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer, ‘sister cities of the Anthropocene’: the idea that our cities are linked, globally, by direct or vicarious physical flows of waste, energy and ecological disaster. This hydrological globalisation envisions the cities of the world as a sort of archipelago, no metropolis safe from the feedback loops of environmental causality, our agency as both individuals and collectives. On Orkney, we were taught to think community as process, rather than something given. I guess sometimes you have to descend from your intellectual tower to find it: see yourself in symbiosis; your body, as a tumbled, possible object: ‘All arriving seas drift me, at each heartbreak, home’ (Graham, ‘Three Poems of Drowning’).

Somehow, lately, I have been unable to drink myself into drunkenness. Everything is a spritzer whose taste effervesces like the further most points of the sea at sunset, those glisters of peachy waters which seem almost to fizz beneath the pleasure of light. To think of that expanse as the body’s active limit, like the horizons of video games, whose traversal would teleport you back to some familiar, originary location. Flip away. Endpoints as triggers for reversal. To travel outwards, to raise yourself clean into movement. To make of the body its own hypothetical. It’s like I want only the blueprint potential, the colours and geometries.

The waves move against me. I do not drink.

Queue, Free Love (FKA Happy Meals) ‘Pushing Too Hard’. This ultra-dappled, smiley-faced italo-disco is a sort of vertigo. I mean I am spinning silver in its listening. Emptiness requires its own containment. To dance in parallels then pirouettes, to queue time upon time’s arabesque. To oooooze. The little eddies of the ocean still swallowing, the sun ravelling down like residue soda. Whatever direction you make into ceremony, pleasure.

The bunching of muscle, where sun hits the boulevard. Where the boulevard bursts into its many discographies of water, inclined to times beyond and before, a gradient popularity of passengers and travellers, nomadic ravers. Where the boulevard is not a waypoint but the lengthy stretch of hypnosis itself, an astral plane into sunlit ethers.

The very word boulevard, a sort of ferric opulence unfolding a hazy, urban sprawl.

All of this wayward July, and the synths so warm on my skin, and every conversation a twirl of hyperbole. I wanted nothing of night again, as night was just the day’s refresh and erasure. All through the summer, the air so syrup and seething.

I book the overnight ferry, I dream of a world without timetables. The tide sloshes over me and it is sleepless, and it is heat.

This is rich-text. All of oddness. I’m just so much happier at four in the morning, in the priory of sunrise. Missing you.

Cherish the currency of friendship, however the slightest touch is a glorious misreading. Miss reading, I’m missing. Mist between the one and the two and same, faintness of incense that is. The body unshowered, the mist of heat. The endless messaging dew drops of moisture; your pearly brow is beautiful. It isn’t as though you could shift sentences for me. I’m just as weak.

Suzanne Roden of Free Love sings sometimes in French and slips between two languages, the language of the one and the other, the foreign tongue as love in transition. The lively nuance of melodic translation. To stretch meaning, to make of its pulse the possibly unmappable. We listen and maybe we don’t quite need to understand, we just need the potential of passage, its affective route per semantic reach. Glossing Derrida on love, Maria-Daniella Dick and Julian Wolfreys write thus:

Love calls on us to be responsible in coming to map the unmappable, to be open to the possibility of the impossible, and the possibility of this impossible experience is that, in short, which is between us, and which remains: to come. Love is always just this exemplary passage between tongues, in what is foreign, other in the language one calls one’s own.

There is a healthy cascade of reverie. There is browse and incline, click and encryption. The love that you seek. Every pop song is of course love’s expression, the fluid joy of a ~solid~ ego; and yet to map that point of dissolve in which this ego is the melt-point of ipseity’s porous limit, is that not the deferring impulse of disco? Strike through to jouissance. The repetitive beat, the multiple oscillating climaxing motion; the avoidance of pop’s inevitable, normative denouement; the queerish musing deliciously around fulfilment; the rhizomatic overflow of the senses!

Your forehead is hot. It is glass for the shattering. We are fashionable and hackneyed, practicing lunacy where the beats scream and are again crass in their lust and elation, their confinement to time and place and the pulse of this darkness.

When my irises bleed, is this a form of eschewing the present? As in, swallowing an elsewhere unseen to the other? We see our eyes outside, in the comedown glow of street lamp smoulders. We the parts of our bodies as an archipelago, every isle slowly swallowed by rising water.

This tectonic pulse, this encompassing warmth.

You’re pushing too hard. And so language is physical, and so is literally thrust in, into, the armoury of love. I will not say weapon, I will not reduce a necessary plural to the singular tool, the implied signified of the phallus. The piercing. My eyes become pliant.

Make of the air her dulcet voice, over and over like rain’s refusal. Make of this moment a lightness, a smoothing. Trace little bumps and ripples and glitches; the motion is softcore, resplendent’s true sense.

Love is also the coveting of blindspots, those absent locations of self’s abyss which lie adjacent to the lieux de memoire recognised as the sites of love’s memory, of memory’s happening in love. Love as process of betweening, as immersion. A feel-good, a good feeling. The prolonging of ephemeral sensation in an act of imaginary narrative, its plights and highs and necessary zigzags. Act within capitalism, act without; act as pop’s dazzling detournement. So here by the convenience store we kissed, so here by the river; so at the window we shared cigarettes in a friend’s apartment, by the ersatz palms, so these screens between us, so the niche forums that served as our weird, oblique interface; so here where the road slumps into a junction, so here at the station where you had to go. A whole topography of abstract thought, remix it. Drink it. So memories of mountains, so sharing the lakes we made up in memory; that you swam in, the lakes I walked round as a child, the heather on hills where ashes were scattered. This interface, these blue messages. Blue irises. The shape of a letter impressed on a map. The silent valley, its conclusive basin of time; where life is swallowed. I memorialise a thought, the quality of light in August, its paler gold among green; whose green is mortal again, whose green is set to fade. Your pupils resolve all green of the iris to blindspots, they mop up the blue with the black of sleep. And to sleep as equals is to forget the self, to wake in a room between rooms, to find yourself caught as other again, your room unfamiliar, the room never yours even less so now. The very first utterance of morning might break the spell. How the sky looks different through your open, solar window!

And I’m not the one to help you / Although I’d like to tryyyyy.

Clatter and wave, video game imperative to action and motion. Soundtrack the heat. Make reverie of weather. The production is so acid house. The production inclines toward dance. Externalise the internal. Naturalise the natural. A certain elasticity of underlying beat, as if bass were the hum of the blood that produces affect. As if it were all that reducible. As if in that energy. Make our mammalian restraint ethereal.

The Quietussays of Free Love’s music, ‘Their vision is a utopian one, influenced by rave culture, Eastern religions, politics and magic’. To unhinge love from its possessive sense, love becomes an ambient tone in the spread of the days between days which we count in love, if love is a sense as any other, an orientation between things, between selves, the one and the same. If love is something… that something within us must export to numbers. How many days has it been, I’ve been thinking all week… Here are our figures. Crunch on a sort of krautrock lingering, the impersonality at the heart of euphoria’s insistent heat. Free Love have used drones before, meditative, balearic beats. It’s a process of seeking the nuanced frequency, the cleaner hum of Being, what might spread into an open future, something bright to seize. Design your consciousness for different realms, just feel the synaesthesia of speculative situation. The future’s flirtatious, maybe it speaks French. It’s a bright pink, cherry-red electric French.

In his spectacular tome, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (1998), Kodwo Eshun talks of how the subaquatic techno-duo Drexciya ‘fictionalise frequencies into sound pictures of unreal environments […]. They fictionalise the psychoacoustic volume of a giant submersible’. ‘Pushing Too Hard’ implies a current out of sync with its destination, an unbalancing in the passage between entities. A kinetic effort. Disco’s warm flicker invites that spiralling back to aporia; not a giving up in the sense of seduction’s failure, so much as surrender to the unknown and its cheeky, distinctive flourishes of acid, italo, proto-house all drenched in funk. I don’t pretend to understand French; my language is literally standard grade, processed only to that limit.

Plastique: plastic. What seems elastic, mutable, but is in some sense unerasable—a material that ultimately remains. Residuals. Shards, bits. When ‘Pushing Too Hard’ collapses into its A-side twin, ‘July’, the beats are fatter, darker, hotter—brooding with a sense of summer’s latency as always already. The plastic feeling is inside me, it’s a melting, it’s a coming-into-skin. Sonic duplicity. It’s the Anthropocenic hauntology of organs, it’s a PVC drag of natural sensation. It necessitates dancing, but the percussive chimes in the track’s white-heat centre drag my mind from the present’s solidity. Those chimes are airy, they are elsewhere, enchanted; they are so far removed from the close close city. To be fast and slow, hard and soft, selfish and strong, reflected and present, past and future…Being as syncopation, being as plastic, rent to split. Our lapidary imaginaries, our synthesised clicks of pleasure; a pool of sound, an immersion…I’ve come to relax, to realise.

Visage: face. A word whose very sound is that of sunlight hitting clean the bounce of a mirror, a slide into silver. The waspish vibration of the lips, inclined to glass on the brink of shatter. I think of all those mirror tricks in every ABBA video. The face, the face, the face again. The face we effect. Maria Dick and Julian Wolfreys again: ‘Seeing the face in its absolute and irrecusable singularity, I am given to apprehend a doubleness from the first gaze’. Disco is doubleness inherently split to multiplicity, it is the vying for one attention amidst the millioning of other skins (skins becoming a metonymy of figures, faces), it is the shakeaway of self into other, the imitation, the performance of gesture’s contextual plurality. The face, in Emmanuel Lévinas’ sense, is the announcement of subjectivity: the instating of the subject as a sort of ‘hostage’, as Dick and Wolfreys gloss. It demands a response, stealing the attentions of the self, instating by necessity a certain ethics of wholly Otherness: the human face, as Lévinas puts it, ‘orders and ordains us’. I catch your face on the dancefloor, there is a temporary pact between us. What implicitly slides in the raising of one arm, the twist of hips, copying this dance, a Xeroxing event whose zero-sum origin remains irreducible, whose condition is always undecidable, plural. So far so obvious the ontology of rave culture. Every action now as response. A semi-autonomous severing. Technology can be, as Eshun puts it, a ‘bifurcation in time’. The techno throbbing through the pale membranes of my human sense is a channel for split subjectivity, an experience of falling between worlds.

On the dancefloor, when he asks me what to do, I whisper in his ear, in some half-remembered echo from The Bell Jar: ‘pretend that you are drowning’. And that paranoid panic, that scramble for air in the thrust of the limbs, it seems to work. I see the moisture mist up his glasses. Face after face, we glimpse the phenomenology of substitution, we trade our own affect for the possible electricity of the next. His smile, her hair, our collective sweat. The absurdity of all these moves; the warping of all muscle memory inclined to a known rhythm, then ever the melodic trajectory of an unknown palette. We expose our infinite vulnerability, we abstract ourselves to the dancefloor’s disorderly hospitality, where the reciprocal push-pull of crowd and DJ is a mutual reading and so mutual dissolve, a ‘free love’ whose freedom is conditional on the exchange of gesture, face and motion, of bass, beat and melody. Of sonic and visionary qualities. Of closeness, a close reading.

I imagine my skin looks metallic, right now, as you see it.

Eshun again:

Groove is when overlapping patterns of rhythm interlock, when beats syncromesh until they generate an automotion effect, an inexorable, effortless sensation which pushes you from behind until you’re funky like a train. To get into the Groove is to lock into the polyrhythmotor, to be adapted by a fictionalised rhythm engine which draws you on its own momentum.

Is fiction here the condition for identity’s erasure? We hustle ourselves out of ordinary language, slip into the chug and pulse of the train. Okay so all these bodies in motion. To export yourself to the techne of musical condition. Fold in the overlap, a baroque philosophy of subjectivity’s production. Enter heterotopia with both hope and scepticism. Put away your wallet. Fold yourself. There’s Deleuze’s notion of the fold as a doubling: one thought rolled and pressed into another, the scratch of tobacco in cigarette papers, the promise of chemical stimulation imbibed in the skin, the curlicues of words upon screen and page, the unlocking potential of semiotics in motion. A rolling into, an overlay’s careful pleat of impression and meaning. The duplicity of temporalities in photographic exposure. This tongue curled on a foreign one, the blendable play between French and English, a play between verse and chorus. A recursively mutual translation of inside/outside, the self and other, here and there, near and distant; a translation whose very process belies the instability and futility of such ontological divisions. We relate to ourselves as production, we produce ourselves. But don’t look at me / I’m just as weak. The face that desires, amid over-stimulation, the reserve of hiddenness, the retreat. Subjectivity as a question of mastery, self-relation, processing affect, thought and memory in the world’s abundance, intensified in the sonic duration of a pop song, or in the ever-churning lieux de memoire of a dancefloor, where memory is always in oscillation, caught between bodies and beats. And the magic in that, and the heat.

Every melody’s upswing, a new euphoria: ‘Synchronicity’. Left my ego on the ground. Make of identity its fractal components in disco extension, plugin auroras of thought, the perspectives shifting. Suzanne’s voice spliced between echo and harmony, echoed by Free Love’s other half, Lewis, echoed by her own, echoed by the satisfactions of division’s fall back into rhythm, the tightness of synchronicity. Turn me upside down / I don’t know what’s left in front of me. Resonate, resonate. Duplicity kaleidoscopes originary identity as an always receding, elusive location, infinite addiction. Broken glass, symmetry, the one and the same split shard-ways, a cool euphony of a synthetic present cast ever between past and future; the neuromuscular necessity of this beat, this bodily response; hyperstition; this brainwave as process corrosion, as shimmer and sweet, as almost coincidence.

There was a brief period of my life where I was obsessed with Chicago. I thought all the best music came out of Chicago (maybe I could name three bands). It had a specific molten quality in my mind, like everyone there was never quite present but always dissolving at some point into the walls or sidewalks. There were basement clubs and people drank lager lager lager, a nod to cool Britannia, or else they swilled actual Liquor. I actually had no idea what went on in Chicago. It was possible everyone smoked in dingy bars and went about listening to jazz, feeling miserable. Did it rain much? All I had to go by was a Fall Out Boy lyric: ‘I’ve got a sunset in my veins / And I need to take a pill to make this town feel okay’. I was thirteen and still didn’t know what Seven Minutes in Heaven meant, let alone Sophomore; the spidery long titles made me feel Poetic. I was convinced Pete Wentz was the Bard of his generation. I still hadn’t seen any live footage of him goofing around onstage. I mostly thought of him in dark corners, sweeping his fringe aside, scribbling lyrics. Too much got spilled on the internet. I couldn’t believe when I found out he only played bass.

Wasn’t there a gimmick with one of their albums, where you got special tarot cards if you pre-ordered?

We used to stand on tables, chairs and cabinets back then, to get our selfies. Back then, they were prosaically named Profile Pics. You had to aim for a good mirror. The visible flash, you thought, was just a sunbeam addition to the general ~aesthetic~. You’d comment on each other’s photos, pc4pc. Like, Hello! It was good to get your legs in. Stripy knee socks or gauzy ripped tights. I wanted to wear a watch round my ankle like the lady with the white pumps at the party in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I put rubber bands round my hair, dying it semi-permanent blue or pink, trying to get ‘coon tails. I backcombed with a religious zeal, scrunching as I walked to maintain the buoyancy. Hairspray wafted around us; a flammable aura of considerable permanence. There was an imperative to asymmetry, to looking a little like a lamppost. We all wanted to be skinny, we wanted the biggest hair.

I grew addicted to the bright, popcorn guitar licks. The sugary vocals. They spoke to someone that wasn’t me; there was this constant apostrophe of the lost girl, the lost boy, the key to a locked diary. I felt like a year would pass and I’d slip into these narratives, grow tall, smelling the gas of those cigarette lighters my friend used to rig to make the flames a foot high.

I don’t blame you for being you / But you can’t blame me for any name.

There was this corny idea of the rock show, everyone bobbing their heads in time. It was basically prom without the couples and expensive dresses. We all dropped weight for it, we all found a sweat in the rhythm and heat. When I got sick, I watched Kerrang! TV for hours, probably still playing my Game Boy or something. They’d show FOB videos more or less on repeat. I waited up for my crush on MSN, gossiped with friends; maybe there was something in that cyan-coloured comic sans font he used. We drank Jolt Cola cut half and half with Glen’s Vodka. An electric shandy, six times your daily recommended caffeine. Running down the beach. Emoticon wars. Back then in the middle of nowhere, a text was like a radar signal sent from the deep.

I wrote all sorts of pop punk lyrics all over my Sports Direct trainers. I like to think I turned up to gym class with these crappy white trainers, each one adorned with My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me. My teacher looked me up and down with disdain. I imagined she listened to Meatloaf on the car to work each day, wolfing tuna sandwiches. She said my trainers were too ‘flat’. She dragged me out the library, where I was often skiving; she made me play badminton for hours. I liked to reach and aim, slam something delicate and thin to the ground. That was kinda how it felt being in the world, trying to fly out all light and free, then some dude with a bat just whacking you back down, crushed and moth-like. Playing badminton felt vengeful. There were spiders in the showers of the changing rooms afterwards. There were kids in first year who would throw golf balls over a fence to hit us. If they smashed a window, we’d get the blame. Some of us stole fags round the back of the gym block, looking out at the Carrick Hills.

Walking the crossroads was my favourite escape. I liked the bit that unfurled into greenery, sheep, rolling hills. Sometimes I’d be climbing Kildoon, sitting by the falls. That was learning to breathe again. When a lorry came, I felt the rush pass through me like a terrible swarm of ghosts. I was rattling.

There were diet pills you crushed with pro plus, sipped with diet coke or JD.

In The Virgin Suicides, Lux writes the name of her crush on her underwear. This is a false start, by any means. In writing we only possess a shard of some other self. It’s only ever temporary. The shape of ribs, a smile, the cut of your bangs or hipbones.

Imagine writing a name now. Keats Keats Keats. Each iteration a tiny seed.

Sometimes I liked to just lie on the concrete.

In town, loitering is our ontological condition. We exist for no other reason. We browse but never buy things. Some of us sneak lip glosses, necklaces, bars of chocolate beneath our sleeves. I had a friend that could even steal booze and pills. I’ve saved up my daily lunch money just to get here on Saturdays. In Burger King, we kill time and snort vitamins for kicks. A year before the haze of legal highs set in. We are so young.

All our talk is just procrastination. I watch you try on neon sports jackets in TKMaxx and it’s the best best thing.

In Chicago, they had a scene. Sufjan sang about it on some movie they showed, eventually, on Sunday TV. Little Miss Sunshine. I’m not saying I identified with the nihilist son, but…I wished sometimes it was acceptable not to talk. The less I ate, the less I spoke. That was liberating, I suppose. I was in love with the place, in my mind / In my mind.

There was the Easter holidays we played football down the Low Green every day, the last time in that year I remember being truly happy. All sorts of drama happened, breakups and makeups, and we watched it roll out from a distance. Smoked occasional menthols, hid under climbing frames, spun each other round in the night till we were dizzy. I never once grew tired of waiting at train stations. I had my iPod, my violet-lined eyes, my dreams.

We walked along the river sometimes, deep in the foliage, and joked about places you could get away with having sex in. We counted the bottles of Buckfast, watched out for insects. Nothing seemed alive in the undergrowth.

At school, there were never any practice rooms free so we sat on the floors of corridors, playing our shitty guitars. ‘Californication’, over and over, following some half-arsed tablature. The solo to Robbie Williams’ ‘Angels’ (how joyous I’d be if I knew ten years on a friend would make a vapourwave remix). I had no time for it–I was never coordinated enough for those licks and chords–but having the guitar in front of you was a kind of protection. You could talk all nonsense and pretend to passing teachers that you were doing work. As if they understood the mysteries of music. Regularly, the tech teacher would ask me, whenever I came to school with my trombone, if I was carrying a machete, an AK47. I nourished a kind of inward, low-level fury. Sometimes, they’d drop pennies at our feet for a laugh, as though we were busking. I wondered about all that copper and metal: where it went, eventually.

We wrote a song that ripped off the chords to ‘Brain Stew’ and my amp blew up someone’s boyfriend’s laptop. On weekends, there were sleepovers and we’d stay up till the wee hours, breaking apart massive bars of Cadbury’s Caramel while chatting to folk on MSN, Chatroulette, the laugh track of Friends or Father Ted in the background. There were only two buses home a day, and the rhythm of my Saturdays and Sundays was governed by that. I liked arriving home, sleepily, forgetting I once had a routine. It was wholesome to lie on your bed, listening to Mogwai, slowly sinking.

Occasionally, we went swimming.

There’s a MySpace still out there with all these photos, histories stripped of context. Many of them are in sepia, owing to some new effect I’d discovered on my phone. It was a slide-up phone, designed for playing music out loud. It was like I wanted every memory to be always-already history, taking those sepia pictures. You can’t tell our age, except from the expressions, the thinness of our wrists. It wasn’t that we were innocent as such, it was just that we didn’t care at all. It was written on our faces, this not caring. Soon to be fun, let’s see.

Every lyric iteration of html inevitably fades. What minimalist temple I had designed, stamped with diamond symbols and Crystal Castles mp3s, has since crumbled. It was probably a rip-off anyway. Wanting to look like Uffie, wanting to be cryptic, aphoristic. Coveting emotions as metaphoric fruit. All those bulletins, midnight reveries stolen from time on the family PC, are deleted. The endless, self-questioning quizzes. We learned more about ourselves, about each other that way than we ever did in a PSE lesson at school. We trod a dangerous line, exposing our confessionals. Last time you cried, last time you kissed someone, who do you trust no matter what? Sometimes it bounced back in unfortunate ways.

This has been said / So many times that I’m not sure if it matters.

Kanye calls his kid Chicago. He has that song ‘Homecoming’, with the cute piano riff, a monochrome world. I get a kick out of every library book that was published in Chicago. I have no idea what it means. The pages are dull and yellow, the text swims in a sepia sea. I can’t listen to those albums again without feeling some predictive force, a face from the tarot. It’s like every fast food ad has a burger that looks identical to the last, as though every diner uses the same stock photo database. All our desires grow uniform, in the envy of hair and boys and all consumables. Circling back. Do you think about me now and then?

In Ayr, there are twin roundabouts bordering the station. I always got lost, trying to drive through both of them smoothly. I always came back round, caught in the westward trajectories of the next, the lights from Morrisons carpark smouldering into a school night sunset. Mostly I miss the booze and the dunes, the clandestine sense of just being there, cutting about in front of the ocean. Cutting out time as a fact of the water, the light; sirens cloying the air behind us.

In a sense, April will always be exam season. It is a month of friction, one season rubbing against the next; only eventually the better qualities of spring bleeding through the residues of winter. April snow and April showers. April light, April gloam. It is perhaps the most poetic month, beautiful to say aloud, a little like peeling the sticker off an apple. April. It trills round to a crisp. April of anticipation, April of burgeoning knowledge. April is the sweetest, the cruelest month. Somewhere west of summer. There was a song from my childhood about a boy called Jack and a girl called Marie, young and sweet, this jangly song from the country about the city, tambourines and easy chords; a song about lovers who know one another so well, who fall asleep in wishing wells. It’s kind of simple but a strange song still, the chorus marking the passage of time and the sense that such love alters the landscape within you: ‘And the days will pass like falling rain / And the tide will turn both feeling strange’. Every good lyric contains a potential eternity. The song was ‘Flames’ by Roddy Hart and I burned it off a CD my mother bought at a festival, an early version of whatever the song would become on his debut album, Bookmarks. I always thought that song began in April, the skyline burning bright. April is the first month of that proper, bittersweet feeling that emanates from every street corner. The sense of memory, pungent and leaking through the pores of the city. Here is this place, here is that. Where we walked or kissed or did not. Where you stopped to buy cartons of mango Rubicon, lit a cigarette, slipped your fingers through the new baby leaves of the lindens. Fresh strains of pollen to catch in my eyes, my nose, the membranes of sight and scent. Where we turned over conversational stones that would build up our friendship, the lain-out exchange of opinions on class and politics and art that would form a foundation for seven years hence.

Yesterday, I hadn’t really slept for two days and was riding on a total sleep high until around 7pm. The dawn chorus accelerates a temporary insomnia. Neutral Milk Hotel: ‘How the notes all bend and reach above / The trees’. Sleep deprivation has a similar effect to many drugs: there is a delirium, a rush, a plunge, a sense of depersonalisation or detachment from the world around you. Dreams process all the nonsense of your unconscious and so when you don’t sleep, it just blurts out of you–the ramblings better saved for a diary or song. I have been bumping into things, bruising myself; I have been knocking over glasses of water. It is as though the arrangement of matter in the air around me is out of whack. It is somersaulting and shimmering clumsily into and against my body. It’s not an entirely unpleasant feeling, a sort of letting loose.

Last night, walking home from Yo La Tengo with the sky a violent Prussian blue, split yolklike to a pool of moon, I walked very fast and everything passed and blurred around me. That was the neon unremembered, the smearing of sense that refused all narrative. I passed a girl walking towards me, nearing home in a familiar neighbourhood. It was that thing were vaguely she looked like someone I’d know, I knew, but dressed kinda different. I glanced at her face as I passed and she glanced up at mine and our eyes met and that sort of threw me. Her eyes were intense and glittering, the same Prussian blue as the sky. They were fierce pools twinned by a feeling. When someone has their turbulence beaming through them, that was such a moment. As though someone wrenched a new crevasse inside me and all this new worry, pouring out like liquid gold. It will dry and crackle again in the sun, I’m sure.

This morning, fluttering in and out of treacly sleep, I dreamt I was serving tables at work except work was more like a train carriage, and I was stumbling around carrying trays and plates of food, trying to be nice. The layout of the floor at OM was superimposed upon this narrow train space. I served a table of two young girls and their mother. The girls were imploring their mother to take them to the aquarium. One of them had on a turquoise jumper spotted with tiny white clouds, a bit like the cover of Lisa Robertson’s The Weather, pressed in miniature. They were talking about the aquarium so I split in with my two cents, telling them about the one at Loch Lomond. The last viewing’s at four though, I said. You’ll maybe have to wait till the summer holidays. They didn’t seem perturbed by that. They started asking questions about the aquarium I could not answer, like Is there a tank of mermaids? Do they have sharks? Are there Nemo fish and what do they eat? Are there fish that eat other fish? Mindlessly, I brought to them three sticky toffee puddings meant for another table. They were talking about their summer, chattering away, the clouds moving brightly on Girl One’s jumper. I turned away, facing the other tables as I moved back along the carriage. I suddenly found myself weeping, those hot wet tears you know will take ages to shake. I was weeping for girlhood, for summers off school. Summers I’ll never get back. I felt sticky and silly; I cried in the kitchen and a hundred white checks swirled off the pass and sank down around me. I was too tired to lift a thing. I cried for summers I gave up for regiment, work and illness. I woke up pathetic on a true April morning, pale gold sun and the sound of someone in the distance, mowing their lawn. Everything else very still, a faint murmur of hard-drive hum, my body aching with the unspent sorrow of stupid dreams. Did I even give them the bill, in the end? What do I owe the company?

John James: ‘Looking for a new geological disposition’. I feel the deep, cramping pains of something within me changing, almost tectonic. I remember once a lump of moonstone, unpolished, ripe with numerous accessory minerals, making of its rainbows a plural extravagance. I snap pictures of the oil’s vibrant spectrality on the surface of grey city puddles. Good news arrives in emails. Little electricities go off within me. I soar for new mornings, longing to be smoothened from sleep. I walk around Stockbridge in the quiet hour of twilight, a thin moon eking over the sandstone buildings, the cobbled mews. This is a month of desperate turnings. I am always late, on some sort of overflow or else delay. I run for trains, backpack bumping against denim, catch my breath on the platform. The shops and houses are already thumping away into distance, as the train pulls out of the station. Drifting across the Central Belt’s perpetual rainfall, I am between two cities. Each hold a wonder I’m still trying to claw at, time after the fact. Hugging my knees. The city like a scratch-and-reveal picture, coming up multi-coloured when the carbon-black stuff flakes away, becomes merely the clastic textures of years forgotten. Some people use a penknife for greater accuracy, cutting apart the shapes of their lives. Prising. The black stuff ends up somewhere, lodges all constipated within us. I try not to think too much about Georges Bataille. The man who owns my restaurant shows off to his associates a pop art rendition of severed eyes, hung resplendently obscene among his art nouveau portraits of Burns’ adolescent lovers. He refers to the eye painting, quite obsequiously, as breathtaking. A little piece of me shrivels like a rose; I prise off a piece of cuticle and I know there are similar petals hidden all over this place, slowly rotting. Every eyelid a petal, peeled back and hidden. Someone in a pub somewhere is talking about bull fights. My mouth tastes like grapefruit and alcohol, souring.

There is the blood rush of filming a video in the cold. We spin each other round on shorelines, under subway tunnels, our yellow bags bump and clack in the dark. We run up Garnethill for the camera, we peer among the foliage of evergreen trees, needles sparkling darkness around us. The air is grey; it is thin and cirrussy, deprived of light. We are the only luminous colour, earth and fire and little ideas of pods in Tiree, black coffee, stop signs, cheese sandwiches imprecision of (!!!) that is elsewhere.

At once the blossoms appear. The white one outside my flat is luminous against the azure blue sky. I remember the endless pink blossoms of Maybole Road in Ayr, those bus stop mornings walking to Belmont, or to my father’s office, aged fourteen on my way to work experience. The lilac blossoms of my childhood garden, toasted Escherian limbs of the tree, the bluebells beneath; something beautiful I’ll never see again. Do lilacs even grow in the city? The cherry blossoms seem kind of tired this year; after all, it has been such a winter. They have pushed through snow and cold to get here, little withered blooms whose buds would drink the misty heat. Normal isn’t optional. I grow nostalgic for lunches of the past, eating apples on my break among the daffodils at Botanics. Feeling true sun on my skin, before retreating inside to a world without windows. The world of dust and vinegar.

I read W.S. Graham and make fortnightly pilgrimages to Greenock. I get off the train at Central and we wander Morrisons then back along the road for our workshops. This is a very peculiar Morrisons; it sells unnatural flowers, grafted in alien colours like the genetically-glitched foliage of Alex Garland’s Annihilation. In our workshop, we cover the theme ‘Journeys’. We learn new ways of listening; we map the skeins and twists of our lives, absorbing the lives of others. There are so many strains it’s like those skeins were severed along the way by numerous barbed wires. It hurts to get back on the train and be okay again, but then the late afternoon of sunshine in Glasgow takes our breath away. We are so alive and dazed. There are no scones in my pocket; not even almonds or acorns. I skim over maps of the land around Greenock, wondering about Loch Thom. As I wait for the train, the same time each week, I hear another train, parallel to ours being announced. It is the Ayr train, pulling away before us. I follow the straight road to the loch on the map, ‘stretching away across / Into the blue moors of Ayrshire’. We are surrounded by forest, then real forest. I am deepening by Galloway’s greens. I long like Graham, like ‘the man I made for land’, to somehow ‘Drown in the sudden sounding trees’. A greening comes over me, swallows me like sea.

I arrive at work with plastic-packaged slices of Pink Lady apple, holding them like a prize. Nobody takes up my offer, the crunch out of character, the taste of pesticides.

Buying a secondhand bike, I have started cycling again! It is a wonderful thing. I talk about it and listen to people’s cycling tales, their tidbits of advice; but mostly following the way their faces change when they talk about cycling, the smiles and the light in their eyes reminiscent of freedom. We share stories of bike-glimpsed sunsets, passing scenery, receding buildings, the wind off the Clyde alive in our hair. The wind off the Clyde a grey kind of blue, like the blue in my eyes, the blue that cried salt-licks of oceans. When I am cycling, my heart changing pace, I think less and I feel more free.

It is May tomorrow, and we are nearly in Gemini season. Season of air and light, of psychic twinship.

‘Sometimes all I need / Is the air that I breathe / And to love you’ (Simply Red)

‘And every breath that is in your lungs / Is a tiny little gift to me’ (The White Stripes)

For earnest asthmatic words I’m sorry.

Drawn from the eerie Louisiana marshland of True Detective to the hinterland gothic of Bates Motel to fading memories of the rain-sodden kirkyards bordering Amsterdam, I’m trying to look forward to burnished summer noons, the car that would drive us, the lavender pillow. Detail he remembered. I wear bright colours, then inexplicably black on Sundays. I stand up in gigs with an exhaustion that threatens to topple me, the music pulling my body onwards and backwards again like a tide, a forest susurration—‘Drown in the sudden sounding trees’. Mostly fantasies of falling asleep and waking up somewhere different. Taste the sesh. Everyone loosens in presence on Saturday, glazing the town on my way home with ice-sweet memory; hovering on the bridge to watch traffic lights pull fluoro taffy over the motorway. I listen to your voice recordings in the hour before dawn, darkness furling green and blue at the edges of dreams, a sonic mottling soothing to ambient forest. ASMR. An ecotone in which this quiet euphoric feeling meets flesh, sun-drenched song, rehearsal of sheltered Julys, been and gone. Elsewhere, he is coming off ket, listening to the new Grouper. Outside a same sky fills with similar shimmerings. Gifts of lemon-flavoured San Pellegrino, the aluminium pull that clicks out of sync. Meet or don’t meet your heroes. Nostalgia for dad-rock on a highway dragging you west where summer begins, a hot lump of sun in your throat.

The first time we met, he was already talking about hallucinogens. This isn’t to overemphasise their significance within our relationship, but to give it context, enlightenment. I got a friend request two days later and I knew that maybe he wanted to follow up on our 4am conversation, fueled by chewing tobacco and copious refills of Bombay Sapphire. He had a laugh you could hear in the next room, but he wasn’t by any means American. I liked that about him though, the sitcom quality. He was sort of shivering at the edges, always anticipating the applause. I seemed to find a way to dwell in the beat with indecision, and I suppose he liked that about me. We talked about the deep sagacity of blue glass and later exchanged blue messages. We sent each other trippy, nicotine music over Messenger and then slipped out of each other’s lives awhile.

It was August, the brink of autumn, the next time he messaged.

Now, it might be the prerogative of my story to give details here. Oh I don’t know, things like: what happened in the intervening months, what happened afterwards, what were his intentions–what indeed, were yours or mine? I was listening to this cute track by Teebs called ‘Double Fifths’ and watching the dust scroll through the empty space of my room. I’d cleared everything out to obtain a sense of minimalist realism. I hadn’t cleaned. I’d left stacks and stacks of junk in the street, for the council to pick up–you just had to phone them to arrange a time. At 11.45 on a Friday, I watched from the window as a truck scooped away the residue of my life. What was left: a laptop with crackling speakers, a few clothing items, two types of eyeliner, a book of Tom Raworth poems with pages missing. This was to remind myself that there are other types of logic. Recently, all my words come out riddled with typos, I don’t know why.

I wasn’t to know that you can fall through cleaves where the sky is not quite finished. I can now recall a glitch in Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, a single or multiplayer GameCube game which occupied much of my childhood. There was a special limbo location called the ‘Normal Garden’ where you could raise teardrop-like critters called ‘Chao’. The garden, essentially, was a floating island. If you selected a precise point where sky met cliff edge on the raised mountain I don’t believe you could climb, and you double-dashed real hard into the blue–you could literally fly out the garden, beyond screen, beyond the brown and green. Your sprite would double as it swung out in each overlay of sky and sea (or was it all just sky?), invoking a genuine sense of terrestrial and existential vertigo. A glitch, by its very name, enacts a rupture in the game’s organising logic. Sometimes you can see the little Chao prowling around, half-submerged in the ground. Every arrangement of object and space gets just slightly, temporarily distorted. I didn’t do the glitch often enough to find out if prolonged abuse would damage the code of my game, triggering all sorts of other glitches. Sometimes though, that serenity of repetitive steel-band lullaby leaks into my dreams. I can hear the muted moans of the Chao themselves, the blend of animal cub and human baby that was so unsettling, electronically warped by my television’s poor sound quality. I am always pacing around, jumping up and down, looking for fruit. I fear all the Chao will die before I wake up.

This happens over and over. There is a dark sweet part of me that longs for the Chao to die. The abuse could go on forever. The seasons in the garden do not alter; you cannot align your emotions to fading pastures, solstice awakenings or imminent harvests. Chao abuse is different from crashing cars into innocents, shooting shop owners or beating up on a passing prostitute–the kind of reprobate behaviour you can indulge in via GTA or the like. This felt more perverse. I was but a child and already fantasising over violence, albeit the delicate torture of hurling a Chao at the wall, tackling it into the water. I told myself it was all experiment. The more you hit the Chao, the shorter its life. A simple mortal formula. On the brink of death, the critter goes into a cocoon: grey is the colour of failed reincarnation, pink indicates it will leave an egg behind. A new egg in lieu of a grave. There are numerous ways you can cheat this death, namely by exiting the garden without saving and returning to pick up your Chao before the internal clock does its doing. You can place it in a water location; Chao cannot die when swimming. You cannot, I suppose, drown a Chao; although I seem to remember Sonic himself was supposed to be a terrible swimmer. Some noughties cartoon where he falls through the sky and helplessly into water. There’s an Eley Williams story that ends with all these hedgehogs floating in a twilit pool, ‘right in the very centre, sitting like asterisks, like parodies of stars’. That really stung me; the sense of nobody really knowing what to do.

Once upon a time, my father rescued a hedgehog he’d found in the garden, curled in my collie dog’s empty water bowl. It was covered in frost and shivering profusely, so we knew it probably wouldn’t make it through the night. I wanted to stroke it, express my primal sympathies, but my father reminded me of the needles. Everything sweet will prick eventually, he might’ve said.

Was there something sick inside of me, that made me want to harm the Chao? I wanted to break them, shorten their lives; albeit often only to go back and comfort them. I wanted to be their protector, but to do that I had to instate a threat. Through this, I learned the psychology of the abuser. It was the taste of bile, a question of power: I literally held the balance and duration of life in my tiny, pixelated paws. For every smash against the wall, there could be a caring caress. Binge and purge. I could leap to the heights of a palm and drop back down with fruit, an apple to hand to my tiny darlings.

As I said, the music got into my head. I hadn’t played the bloody game in over ten years but the tropical, jewellery box lullaby was lodged inside of me. There were palms and psalms in my dreams for weeks. At first, we only cooked a measly, careful, handful of shrooms; they were not as abundant as my new friend said. Well, we were going to cook them but actually I think we had them raw, in a sort of brew. If memory serves. He rubbed off the dirt while I tried to find blankets, because it was cold in his flat–too cold for August. His flatmate was milling around, doing the dishes, watching. I think he knew exactly what we were up to.

There have been times since. I thought I was made out of sugar, my whole flesh a trembling of visible particles, and I knew this meant I would die soon. We were at a party on the other side of town where you have to cross a river in a car or train and I was kissing all my friends, all these people I didn’t know, simply because I knew I was going to die. There was no control anymore. I was going to be this heap of sugar, and I thought I would die there alone and my body would fade to grey like a Chao cocoon. I think this was because an old guy at my work once said, ‘Sugar is cancer’s best friend’. He was loading sachets of aspartame sweetener into his tea at the time, while I was devouring a bar of Cadbury because I’d been on my feet for hours and was starving. We enjoyed our mutual poisons, dragging it out. I could not reply with my mouthful of caramel. Now when I look at cakes and sweets in the supermarket, I only think of my own body, its bubbling of blood and skin, a confectionary of molecules. I have lost two stone in the months since; my family at Christmas barely recognised my toothy, skeletal smile. Something about their candour, their concern, really thrilled me. I could tell they were hurt by my behaviour, which they were judging before understanding. They were fools from another dimension. How could they possibly grasp the cannibalistic implications of consuming sugar? I started to dash and leap around them, looking for fruit I could gift to heal the effects of my cruelty. It was exhausting.

My mother laughs out loud to the radio still, and for that I love her–even though she leaves pieces of fruit to brown in her handbag. There is such a thing as too much ripening. How ever could she know the fatal expense of every tangerine or banana? There is less to be said about apples, potent of juice and shining.

On New Year’s Eve, I read ‘Errory’ and finally fully understood. He was messaging me the whole while, his reflections and concerns. Very little about the year to come; everything honed in on the past. Still, I believe he is to become an engineer of sorts. His job is to fit things together, even memory. Mine: to take all apart, quite deliciously, like an intricate honeycomb melting. You have to enact a hovering, to see between beats and worlds and feelings. This is especially visible in Raworth’s line, ‘silhouettes of participants / dangle in their own data’. You see there are stages to everything, and damned if I was to remain purely neutral, Normal. One time, I saw my future as a singular, golden halo, stretching and stretching outwards like one of Saturn’s rings: it became so huge I couldn’t see the edges. It was beautiful. But then all these other halos started to spill from the invisible centre, just gurgling up hundreds of golden rings like from the spout of a fountain and they were spilling outwards and filling all that holy, haloed space. There were too many rings to count. Altogether a gorge of purity. They started to melt into a pool of liquid gold, and suddenly I felt ashamed. This was the time, I think, when I woke up a day later and found him licking my eyes when I thought he was gone. He murmured something about wanting to eat my soul, in a good way. His tongue stung a little and I slipped it into my mouth instead, mulling over our secret. I thought this boy perhaps was the devil. And could I build something with him; what good would I do?

At home, afterwards, I took a long bath and cried and cried. My tears were hot and perfectly formed. I could not stop crying. The salt, I hoped, would neutralise the sugar. Chao cannot die in water.